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nb This is written today, amidst the greatest uncertainty we’ve ever experienced in my lifetime, in the tattered remains of a postwar political consensus. I’m hurting. Be kind.

I am European. I was born in 1974, in a European country. I love being European, and I love being British. There’s no contradiction there; I am also proud of being from Sussex too, with all the traditions that brings. And will always love my hometown, Worthing, which has its own identity, quirks and ways within the wider county. Think of it like Russian dolls, a Worthing boy, my Sussex identity nestled inside my Britishness, inside a European shell.

In the last few years, I have been very lucky and, for the first time in my life and thanks to work, I have been able to travel. We had a couple of childhood holidays – Austria with PGL, Paris – but I…

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Was the referendum result the revenge of the ‘left-behind’ voters? Not the most recently left-behind, says the Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell. Those areas that have experienced the sharpest fall in income since EU enlargement might have been expected to vote most strongly for Brexit but, as Torsten shows, “there is no relationship between how an area’s prosperity […]

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I’ve not suffered grief, not as an adult. The last time someone really close to me died, it was 1979. It was the simple sadness of childhood and long forgotten by now.

A cancer diagnosis for a close relative (and not my own) probably is the closest I’ve come. That thing, when you wake up and wonder ‘yeah, why am I sad?’ and the thud when your brain reminds your heart. Apparently this happens because you can’t process it in one hit. Your mind ‘reconstructs’ the way things were before ‘the thing’ as you follow the usual pattern of your day – and then the thud. Yeah, here comes that thing again.

So it goes with Brexit.

Shocked, bemused, frustrated, livid, INCANDESCENT, frightened, swearing at my mum on Skype about all those other motherfuckers (sorry Mum), Over it, On top of it, laughing out loud on the train at the futility and receiving dagger eyes from the other camp, getting drunk (lotsa booze folks), Blubsy in the Corner, gigantic bags of crisps (it works), one eye on the Bloomberg channel ticker feed, one eye on the Guardian, one eye on the Kardashians (What a bad time to be all up to date with the Housewives of 3 major US cities? Big assed Kardashians are a poor substitute I know, but my GOD, Those People! And I’m slightly enamoured with the way they bleat like lambs when they laugh. It’s soothing. Kanye remains silent throughout. He’s a Remainer, God love him).

But not the Queen. God is not going to save the Queen – after her bloody dinner party Parlour Games, giving the Bingo set young and old their coded message: Give me 3 good reasons to stay in the European Union. [Give me 3 good reasons to keep the Monarchy, M’am] She may as well have sent a guilty-edged note on vellum, rolled into cigarillo formation and tucked into the collar of a Corgi to every doggone household ‘up and down the country’ (I hate that cliché, I rue the day it was coined) with the words. VOTE LEAVE. Way to go QEII.

“But Grandmama, you’ve lost half of the realm. It was our future. Now what?”